As I prepare to unleash my first full-length project, I need to get a few things straight with you – the audience.
Firstly, I am proud that I got to this point. I made an album that is deeply personal, raw, and imaginative. I made these songs for myself before considering an outside perspective or the market.
The album is a coming-of-age story with the protagonist drifting through space before colliding into human conflict. Each song brings you into a separate world – an immersive space playing with various textures, soundscapes, and nonlinear storytelling.
The sound of this project doesn’t follow any recycled rubric or aesthetic methodology you have heard or felt before. It’s the music construct of my inner monologue in 2022-23, narrating my life across San Francisco, Seoul, Taipei, Hyderabad, and Buenos Aires. I’d say it is chaotic, serene, expansive, emotional, disorganized, and a sensory overload at times.
Most of the material in this album is built on my older style and production – asymmetrical songs with inaudible spacey vocals riding psychedelic rock and electronic instrumentals. That is what makes this project special to me. I did everything from start to finish. Every unique sound you hear ringing between your ears was placed in the mix and in that world with vision and intention.
At the moment, I have drifted away from this style quite a bit. My artistry is more streamlined now – it involves recording vocals and adding production to beats that are sent to me.
I now favor making music that gets people dancing, excited, and feeling swagged out. But this is not the ethos I’ve always had or a vision I wanted to pursue until now.
The Listening Experience
I hope you immerse yourself in the album-listening experience; listen to each track front to back with a comfy pair of headphones. This is not the type of music you would want to play regularly, in front of a group of people, or throughout your daily activities. It isn’t fun or cool in the traditional sense.
“You just don’t get” is what I’d say to those misinterpreting this album for random experimental nonsense. The work has a soul and a purpose if you’re willing to hear it, feel it, and find it.
The listening experience is similar to consuming a film – it requires your full presence and immersion to pick up on the storyline, the scenes, and the climax. Let yourself enter the world. Close your eyes and imagine its dimensions.
Making this album, I perceived music as this free artistic medium that did not need to be conditioned on meta rules or the industry’s taste palette. Music and time felt much more malleable and tuned into distinct emotional states I could channel through the medium.
Godspeed Said the Rain is a reconfiguration of my mind and the places I’ve lived in over the past two years. I refused to apply structure or force some synthetic DNA onto it; the project made itself as I lived my life and recorded ideas based on fresh experiences. I built every track from scratch and recorded vocals whenever and wherever the time was fitting.
Where was GSTR made?
1. Start of Time – The Prologue
Produced in Seoul. Recorded in San Francisco.
2. Long Way Home
Produced in Los Gatos. Recorded in Seoul and Los Gatos.
3. Sounds of Psychosis
Produced in Seoul. Recorded in Seoul.
4. This War Is
Produced in Taipei and Buenos Aires. Recorded in Taipei.
5. Seoul Station
Produced in Seoul. Recorded in Seoul and Los Gatos.
6. Somewhere at the End of Time
Produced in Seoul. Recorded in Jeju and Seoul.
7. Formosa
Produced in Los Gatos and Buenos Aires. Recorded in Los Gatos and Buenos Aires.
8. The Rain – The Epilogue
Produced in Buenos Aires. Recorded in El Calafate.
I have had the privilege to be on a world tour of sorts. I take something new from everywhere I go.